Derek Fordjour (b. 1974, Memphis, Tennessee) makes paintings, sculptures, and installations in which exuberant visual materiality gives rise to portraits and other multilayered compositions. Fordjour’s tableaux are filled with athletes, performers, and others who play key roles in cultural rituals and communal rites of passage. In his paintings, Fordjour methodically constructs the ground of each composition through a collage-based process involving cardboard, newspaper, and other materials and pigments. The varied and textural surfaces that emerge are as complex—and physically engaging—as the dynamic subjects that Fordjour inscribes on top, within, and through them.
